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¹⁹Davies neglected to calculate parallax when determining the Moon's apparent position. Rawlins' corrected analysis shows that Vespucci must have been off the coast of Guinea (not Brazil as Vespucci claimed) to have made the observation described. Both Davies' paper and Rawlins' rebuttal are unpublished; but see Dennis Rawlins, ‘Peary, verifiability, and altered data’, DIO 1: 1 (1991/1/14), 29.Google Scholar

²⁰DrCharles, Kowal as quoted in The Washington Post, 11 Dec. 1990: A5.Google Scholar

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²³I have followed Molander's convention and used Columbus's daily positions as given by John W. McElroy in ‘The ocean navigation of Columbus’, The American Neptune 1 (1941), 219–239. The position on 27 February is not given by McElroy in this article, but it can be measured from the map in Morison (1942) (opposite p. 228) at 37°.7 N, 17°.6 W.Google Scholar

²⁴ The conjunction occurred at 22:16:10 Universal Time on 24 September, which is 191 2 hours Local Mean Solar Time for an observer at 45°. 58.4 W, McElroy's position at dawn on the 26th-which would have been dawn on the 26th after applying Molander's 24-hour shift. Molander's given time of 1907 hours LMST is therefore off by at least 5 minutes. Eliminating the 24-hour shift puts Columbus at 45° 9'.2 at dawn on the 25th, and the conjunction at 0715 hours. But we should really interpolate McElroy's dawn positions for 1915 hours the previous night, which would put Columbus at 29° 8'.4 N, 44° 47'.8 W, and the time of conjunction at 1917 hours LMST. We should also note that in this era before accurate clocks, the concept of mean time was unknown; the time used in this period was local apparent solar time, or ‘sundial time’.Google Scholar

²⁵ Lunar positions have been calculated from Michelle Chapront-Touze and Jean Chapront, Lunar Tables and Programs from 4000 B.C. to A.D. 8000 (Richmond: Willmann-Bell, 1991). Accuracy at this epoch is approximately 37 arcseconds. Planetary positions have been calculated from Pierre Bretagnon and Jean-Louis Simon, Planetary Programs and Tables from –4000 to +2800 (Richmond: Willmann-Bell, 1986). Accuracy at this epoch is approximately 7 arcseconds for Jupiter and Saturn, 23 arcseconds for Mars, 10 arcseconds for Venus and Mercury, and 2 arcseconds for the Sun. I have optimistically assumed that Columbus was aware of lunar parallax and corrected for it at all times; this correction is absolutely necessary for any longitude determination, since it can alter the moon's apparent location by over a degree and the resulting position fix by as much as 30° in longitude. I must point out, however, that there is no historical evidence that Columbus was aware of lunar parallax, nor of how to correct for it.Google Scholar

²⁶ Dr Schaefer has contributed a letter on this subject to the ongoing Columbus Landfall Round Robin, of which both Molander and myself are contributing members. These correspondences have a wide distribution, and can be considered public, albeit unpublished.Google Scholar

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²⁸ By coincidence, no Mercury conjunctions are correlated to a position fix.Google Scholar

²⁹ By coincidence, a probably invisible daytime conjunction with Venus is correlated to a position fix.Google Scholar

³⁰ Including daytime conjunctions would have given Molander one more correlation success, on 15 February, but the large increase in P caused by including all the uncorrelated daytime conjunctions actually would have been less favourable for the alleged lottery-odds coincidence, even with the 15 February success. Thus, Molander excludes the daytime conjunctions. By coincidence, Molander also excludes the position of 15 February and so avoids a correlation failure.Google Scholar

³¹ By coincidence, two of Molander's correlation successes occur below the horizon.Google Scholar

³² By coincidence, all of these errors favour a correlation between conjunctions and position fixes.Google Scholar

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